Are lone mothers 'going it alone' in late modernity? In this fascinating work, Martina Klett-Davies examines how women negotiate lone motherhood in Britain and Germany. She draws on interviews with 70 unmarried lone mothers living on state benefits in inner city areas to examine the complexity and diversity of their lives, the ways in which they try to manage choices and constraints, and how they position themselves as carers, dependants or as paid workers. Going it Alone? assesses the extent to which individualization can explain the experience of state-dependent lone mothers, further develops the concept and provides a better understanding of lone mothers. Suggestions with regard to paid employment, education and state benefits are provided as well as policy recommendations for increasing the options available to lone mothers.

The book aims to show that, in the 21st century, it is possible to live, love, form a family without sex, without children, without a shared home, without a partner, without a working husband, without a heterosexual orientation or without a biological sexual body.

Since the unification of the DDR and the GDR, women living in the former East Germany have lost many of the advantages that came with a planned economy. This collection of essays examines the reinvented meaning of gender and the experience of East German women since unification.

The New Uprooted explores the relationship between the single mother and her social and physical environments. Mulroy examines how demographically diverse single mothers experience dual roles as sole family breadwinner and sole resident parent in the 1990s environment of scarce resources. Families headed by single mothers have become a unit of social concern not only because they represent a changing family form, but because their economic marginality threatens a downward spiral toward the instability of urban poverty. The mothers' key settlement issue is the high cost of housing their families in relation to low wages, irregular or nonpayment of child support, public welfare benefit levels, and the effects of domestic violence.

The IBR, published again since 1971 as an interdisciplinary, international bibliography of reviews, offers book reviews of literature dealing primarily with the humanities and social sciences published in 6,000 mainly European scholarly journals. This unique bibliography contains over 1.2 millions book reviews. 60,000 entries are added every year with details on the work reviewed and the review.

Becoming a mother changes lives in many ways and this original and accessible 2005 book explores how women try to make sense of, and narrate their experiences of first-time motherhood in the Western world. Tina Miller pays close attention to women's own accounts, over time, of their experiences of transition to motherhood and shows how myths of motherhood continue because women do not feel able to voice their early (often difficult) experiences of mothering. The book charts the social, cultural and moral contours of contemporary motherhood and engages with sociological and feminist debates on how selves are constituted, maintained and narrated. Drawing on original research and narrative theory, the book also explores the disjuncture that often exists between personal experience and public discourse and the cultural dimensions of expert knowledge.

This book views the Neo-Sensation mode of writing as a traveling genre, or style, that originated in France, moved on to Japan, and then to China. The author contends that modernity is possible only on "the transcultural site"—transcultural in the sense of breaking the divide between past and present, elite and popular, national and regional, male and female, literary and non-literary, inside and outside. To illustrate the concept of transcultural modernity, three icons are highlighted on the transcultural site: the dandy, the flaneur, and the translator. Mere flaneurs and flaneurses simply float with the tide of heterogeneous information on the transcultural site, whereas the dandy/flaneur and the cultural translator, propellers of modernity, manage to bring about transformative creation. Their performance marks the essence of transcultural modernity: the self-consciousness of working on the threshold, always testing the limits of boundaries and tempted to go beyond them. To develop the concept of dandyism—the quintessence of transcultural modernity—the Neo-Sensation gender triad formed by the dandy, the modern girl, and the modern boy is laid out. Writers discussed include Liu Na’ou, a Shanghai dandy par excellence from Taiwan, Paul Morand, who looked upon Coco Chanel the female dandy as his perfect other self, and Yokomitsu Riichi, who developed the theory of Neo-Sensation from Kant’s the-thing-in-itself.